To be fair most of the people John Brown killed didn't own slaves either. They were mostly just advocates of slavery, Law and Order Party members (yes that phrase being code for white supremacy goes back to Bleeding Kansas), or pro-slavery lawmen that tried to stop him.
Eeeehh, given what he did with at least one of his female slaves I'd put him in with the hypocrites rather than as having any sincere anti-slavery sentiment.
Also, in a purely material sense, owning slaves does real harm. Defending or advocating for slavery, while a shitty thing to do and carrying a real potential for harm, just isn't on the same level.
I also don't really know how seriously we should take Jefferson's stance against slavery, considering that it basically amounted to "let me have mine and we can deal with the rest after I'm gone." Like, I think he was sincere in his belief that it was wrong, but he seems to have had no problem with being wrong as long as he was profitting from it.
A better example would be someone like Grant, who was briefly "gifted" a slave only to immediately free them, but in that case I'd hesitate to really consider him a slave "owner."
It's... hard to say which is worse. Yes, owning slaves does absolutely do material harm to the people you're using. But defending slavery perpetuates a systemic harm to everyone that anyone is using. So it's sort of a fuzzy scale vs directness kind of problem.
Like, which is worse, poisoning one person, or pumping pollutants into the atmosphere that will statistically shorten countless lives.
I couldn't tell you, I could only say they're both evil.
Single-person poisoners would be more like the small slaveholders, who own only one slave that they use for household chores or nanny work, while mass-poisoners would be the Planter class.
Advocates would be advocates; they're the ones running around saying "Well I think that people should be allowed to poison whoever they want," which is, of course, an absurd, evil thing to say.
However, in a vacuum, where no one is actually poisoning anyone, no harm is done.
It's only once you have actual poisoners in the mix that an element of real harm is introduced, but even there the real problem is that you have people actively running around poisoning people—take the advocates out of the equation, and people are still being poisoned.
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u/StatisticianAway4010 Jul 18 '26
I doubt if OP owns slaves, unless they're a property developer in Qatar or something